Posts by Carpet Deal 'em 399 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2017
Actually, if you read the fine print on a modern hard drive box, they admit the advertised capacity is just them lying through their teeth: while you would normally expect 1TB to mean 1024GB of 1024MB of 1024KB of 1024 bytes each, they use 1TB to mean 1000GB of 1000MB of 1000KB of 1000 bytes each(a difference of about 9% or 93 actual gigabytes). They were sued over this, but the case was dismissed because of that disclaimer.
Is that only a ludicrously small number are permitted to be processed on the same block, not due to there being too few Bitcoins. The developers could easily send these fees plummeting by increasing the blocksize(and therefore the number of transactions that can be processed at once), but they've steadfastly refused to do so(which lead to the Bitcoin Cash fork).
> If I was asked to provide the numbers, I would be unable to do so.
Which isn't what they're asking for. The claim is that, since they know you know how to unlock the device, they have the right to force you to do so without that pesky fifth amendment getting in the way. You could be forgiven for misunderstanding that bit, though: this is some of the finest hairsplitting in human history.
> I like the vast majority of users have a widescreen monitor and yet the web designers only allow the web site to fil the central third of the screen .Why? Nobody remebers, maybe because someones great aunt had a 640x480 CRT monitor once. Why not go out on a limb and offer a widescreen version of web site? Or even let html flow the text to the width of the browser...just saying.
There are a lot of screwed up things UI designers do, but this isn't one of them(which is to say, it's time-tested advice). Excessive width is tiring on the eyes, whereas vertical reading isn't much of a much. Having to read sentence after sentence across the width of an ultrawide monitor would just be a usability nightmare.
> "But the poorly-educated didn't understand this, so the back formation "flammable" was created (by the lawyers, I suspect"
Not so much "poorly-educated" as "not familiar with this exact word". Given that "in-" is almost always a negating prefix in English, it's quite reasonable to assume it would be in this context as well, which is why the US National Fire Protection Association pushed to have it snuffed out as a safety hazard. Whether they recoined the term or continued it from its previous existence isn't an answer I'm familiar with, though.
> Funny that while the heinous crime of releasing the DNCs secrets was so horrible, even they don't claim fabrication of any of that.
This is exactly my sentiment. What does it matter who hacked the DNC? The only thing that matters is the content of the leaked material; it wouldn't change a damn thing if it were some Columbian or Seth Rich.
> That does not mean that any private company has to provide you with a platform to say it.
I'd say YouTube(and Facebook and Twitter, etc) qualifies as a public forum and shouldn't be treated with a simple "they can do what they want". And, while it hasn't been firmly applied to cyberspace yet, California law(which they'd all fall under) is clear that public fora aren't allowed to censor people just because the owners don't like them(a law I'd love to see made universal).
> So no, blockchain adds exactly zero to the integrity of voting - and if it does it makes some people actively less safe from coercion.
The logical answer here is to have some key that a person can use to verify their vote, but doesn't publicly link it to their name, possibly unique to that vote(ie, a serial number) or a more general secret(like social security numbers or such).
> Either things work differently in the US or the best use of this would be to pretend to be the other side and call their supporters.
Good call monitoring would avoid this for the most part. But it seems Hillary was extra stupid and just handed out the list to people to call from the comfort of their own home, because I seem to remember /pol/ doing just this.
> Clearly, the Remain campaign was entirely above board, what with the full weight of our trustworthy Establishment, extensive funding by rich foreign nationals like George Soros, along with the brilliantly and honestly conceived "Project Fear".
> But apparently we Brexiteers are mere racist simpletons, who have been swayed by a barrage of targeted advertising driven off our Facebook profiles (not that I have any FB profile, but never mind facts, eh?).
Beep boop. Russian bot detected.
I'm not entirely sure if implementing something in a sandboxed plugin's a better defense against malware than implementing it in a browser, but it's definitely a better defense against idiot web designers. External plugins usually imply restricting yourself to one a page, but HTML and JavaScript can be sprinkled all over the place without any reason for an idiot to restrain themselves. That alone is a powerful argument against the modern era of ever-exploding web "standards", if you ask me(I'm also a bit of a fan of off-brand browsers, which these fictitious standards actively harm).
"I'm pretty sure it's rather yet another "lets see what else we can include" solution which had to look long and hard for a problem to solve."
You're almost certainly right. After everything previously provided by plugins was pulled into the browser, there was very little constraining idiots from adding everything they could to the "standard". Previously, there was a disincentive to go too far since most of the functionality users needed was already provided by plugins such as Flash and Java(which were in turn limited in what they could do thanks to the plugin API), but now they've been given the keys to the kingdom since there's very little the browser can't access and little to oppose them.
If you ask me, we would've been far better served by a more secure successor to NSPAPI. You could still have sane limits that come from active content being inherently boxed and, perhaps more importantly, you'd avoid the current situation where websites are becoming less and less portable(were things anywhere near this incompatible during the browser wars? Because my dim memory doesn't recall them being that bad).
"I've heard different, reasonable-sounding justifications for assistants, and earlier even, voice navigation, using female voices."
One of my local grocery stores has the typical female voice in English mode on the self checkouts, but a male voice in Spanish mode(US). Make of that what you will.
Then there may be a point after all. If the elevators move fast enough, a bus could pop down to dodge unruly traffic, for example. And if there's no direct route between two tube/metro/subway stations, a bus could stop at one station and take overland people to the next without any special effort on their part. Since vehicle already exist that can switch from road to rail(primarily for railroad maintenance), this isn't impossible - though, again, this all depends on the practicality of getting the busses up and down quickly enough.
But Musk's specific idea is definitely crap.
"If that duty of care is not exercised, he said social networks can expect harsh regulation like Germany's 24-hour takedown laws or the European Commission's one-hour deadline for removal of terror-related content."
Right now somebody's suing Twitter over that "duty of care" under the claim that they're in violation of California law(Jared Taylor et al vs. Twitter), arguing they qualify as a public forum and thus have to let "race realists" and the like have their say.
Given that all the big networks are based in Cali, I'd just love to see the international shitshow Twitter loses. Unmovable wall and unstoppable object here we come.
Let's stop and remember Hillary for a moment:
- She didn't campaign in Wisconsin
- She lied about where she was on 9/11
- She actively called for people to lose their jobs in an underperforming economy
- She advocated war with Russia
- She couldn't even exploit the "woman card" thing right
In other words, just about everybody else running(except Jeb) would've been better. But after they screwed Bernie over, the only candidate left was Trump.
"In my opinion, there is a better case to be made over a delay of more than a year and a half between arrest and trial, which falls a good deal short of the sixth amendment requirement in what seems a fairly uncomplicated case."
One New York kid found himself waiting three years for his day in court(he allegedly stole a backpack). Turns out that NY's "speedy trial" period of six months was(is?) on a stop clock - if the prosecutors ask for another day of delay on Monday and an appointment's not available until next Friday, that's only two days as far as NY's concerned.
Never underestimate the ability of a government to game the least ambiguity in wording to screw you - and don't expect any lube.
"The Germans are making a start with the 24 hour terrorist post removal fines and it's about time all governments forced them to employ people to protect users and address illegal content and actions."
If we're talking about forcing Facebook to take down posts, things could get fiddly before too long: right now there's a lawsuit aiming to get Twitter declared a public forum under California law - and almost anybody's allowed a soapbox in a Californian public forum. Now Facebook isn't Twitter, but Twitter is the social network your social network could smell like and it's almost certain they'll be held to the same standard.
"This is a problem with dismissing ones political opponents as evil, without considering that sometimes they may have a point."
He's taking a swing at altmedia, not "fake news" per se. And it's hardly surprising: Breitbart is by far the biggest, most professional example and they are in direct competition with Fox News. If it weren't for them, I doubt he'd care.
"And the 'ret-poline' seems to be an adequate defense against at least SOME of it, by not using the speculative execution thingy in the first place."
Retpoline doesn't get in the way of most speculative execution; that would make the penalty of the Meltdown mitigation look positively light-weight in comparison. Instead, it tricks the processor into treating simple jumps as function calls, which are handled differently(though our buddies at Intel have managed to screw up that bit of security: in the right circumstances, newer models can starting reading from the vulnerable branch buffer rather than the secure return buffer).
This post from Stack Overflow explains it a lot better than I ever could.
> Maybe put a fence around the Apollo landing site and charge admission?
The moon has gravity only a sixth as strong as earth's, so it'd have to be six times as high for the same effect. You can electrify it, but anybody who goes there will be wearing non-conductive gloves. And, of course, you'd need to make it thick and ugly just to avoid people breaking through it with wire or bolt cutters. Really, there's no practical way to prevent vandals from stealing them.
Almost all users that have been caught were doing things like accessing Onion sites with JavaScript enabled, unwittingly leaving themselves open to the world. If you access only static websites or only send to trusted IPs, you're almost entirely safe. Tor was created by the US Naval Research Laboratory to protect intelligence sources; everything else is just noise for the signal to hide in as far as they're concerned. As far as foreign intelligence services are concerned, there are a number of attacks that center around simply owning enough nodes, which the US always has. It's not much help for law enforcement, but, again, they're out of scope.
I highly, highly doubt that serious financial institutions would adopt Bitcoin as their primary transaction method. If their blockchain isn't denominated in some real-world currency, it'll probably be one specifically designed for the purpose. That way, the blockchain would be able to support however many transactions they need at whatever pace they like; they can also pick a better way to handle coin inflation(perhaps by just having a finite number of infinitely divisible coins).
You can pull off voter fraud pretty simply if you use the identities of dead people who haven't been removed from the voter rolls. Even if we ignore the possibility of people casting multiple votes, you can still get people not permitted to vote(eg, felons, illegal aliens) to do the job. Gathering them up, driving them to the polls and bribing them to vote as ordered doesn't add up to all that much.
And, even if we flat-out deny any possibility of it influencing the presidency, things like off-year elections are still vulnerable: if a senate seat's up for grabs in a sufficiently purple state with sufficiently low turnout, you can also bus in people from out of state to pad your numbers while legitimate ones will tend to stay home.
Requiring a photo ID largely fixes this(faking one is a lot more involved, though admittedly still possible, hence the "largely").
"Meltdown was trivially addressed, and new os kernel models will improve performance closer to ignoring it."
The Meltdown mitigation is trivial only in concept. There is a massive performance difference between mapping kernel memory into each and every process's address space(SOP until now) and isolating it to its own, separate address space. This is expensive at the hardware level and always has been; there's no way for an OS to compensate.
As an analogy, let's replace syscalls with changing the volume on your TV. The modern standard for changing volume is with a remote; the Meltdown mitigation is roughly the equivalent of getting up each time you needed to change it. Needless to say, it takes a lot longer for the volume to be changed(syscalls to be completed) than before.
And before you say "performance, uh, finds a way", microkernels have been suffering from just this problem since they were conceived; if there was a solution, decades of research would've found it by now.
Let's try an exercise: go to any of the thousand typing test websites on a normal computer(laptop preferable, but desktops are acceptable) and get your WPM. Then return to the same site and take the test again on a tablet. Compare the two and tell me if you still believe that tablets are serious replacements for laptops.
There are far too many legacy systems to simply not consider PINs. As for a password standard, the USNIST has some recommendations on that front. The highlights:
- All printing ASCII characters(space included) permitted; Unicode support preferable, but not required
- Minimum of eight characters for chosen passwords(six characters for randomly generated ones)
- Permitted password length of at least 64 characters
- Checked against a blacklist
- No complexity or rotation requirements
"And who will determine who has 'rights' to a particular slot in the heavens?"
In all odds, we'll probably see a continuation of the first-come first-serve system. Unless we somehow end up with a Global Space Agency, that's pretty much the only way anything's going to work out.
I've seen calculators that do the apostrophe thing, too. I think it's meant to make them more visible, since otherwise they'd be right where your hand is and the light is the least.
Also, when and where were you in school? Your post is the very first time I've seen someone claim the period isn't the decimal point.
> "What, just because Intel designed, wrote, and released the driver that's causing the problem? Never!"
There's a blackbox warning on the code. The fault ultimately lies with Canonical for taking something with that sort of warning and enabling it in their default configuration.
Any article on any slightly contentious subject is practically guaranteed to be carefully curated by whichever side has the worst trolls behind it, with any corrections that don't fit their narrative nuked from high orbit. The list of reliable sources can also be gamed to ensure only one side has a voice; even if some site consistently generates correct facts, the right Wikilawyering can get its political bent used to ban it.
Having all mankind's knowledge concentrated and easily accessible in one place is a great idea in theory, but the reality is it's unfeasible to keep it accurate. In this regard, maybe it was better when you had to use Lycos or Alta Vista to find a site discussing the subject you were interested in.
There's quite a few things to criticize Trump about, but all these histrionics are aimed at a policy that's four administrations and eleven years old at this point. If you'd click through to the Bloomberg article, you'd see what's being forwarded is little different than existing US safe harbor laws - and, lest you've forgotten, those have been long established as good for the free internet.
This kind of thing can go deep: not too long ago there was a charity drive that specifically stated to not send anything with a Coke label so as not to offend Pepsi(who was donating the storage space). I understand the desire to not have your competitor's logo all over the place, but that's just petty.
"You mean like how tanks keep on being bought even though the Army says we don't need them?"
This one's a bit unusual in that the official justification for this barrel of pork is that there'd be no domestic tank production capability without it. Finding enough boneyards for everything is a drop in the bucket compared to the other waste the military is guilty of, though.
There are plenty of outdoor activities that can be done indoors with a little effort(or money, rather), so not being able to leave the building won't be as big a problem as it sounds at first blush. You'd likely need to shrink things like sportsfields, but we already have indoor variants of both footballs. If you bring grass seed along with UV lights, you can even have something resembling a park.
That said, at some point "self sustaining" is going to include maintaining the population without without bumming people off earth - and history has shown that boredom is an excellent population increaser.
This is a huge thing people forget. People get seduced by "what about the next Netflix? What about the next Google?" so easily that they never stop to think about how they would actually be handled.
Sometimes I see people claim that non-paying websites will be artificially slowed, which is just absurd: as bad as a monopoly is, you can't sell the higher tiers if you don't actually provide speed. The newer argument is that Netflix and Google will have to pay for the enormous bandwidth they use, which is where the "what about the next?" argument comes in.
And here the question has to be raised: will the next Netflix/Google/Facebook actually be as impacted by this as they claim? Or will their modest bandwidth use allow them to grow under the radar until they begin to actually become thought of as the next Netflix/Google/Facebook, while the latter find themselves suddenly beset by competition they already have conquered before it even exists?
TL;DR: We're picking between too sides that want to control the internet and will lie through their teeth to do it.
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